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ESRB Demands Hidden Content Review
Gamasutra is reporting that the ESRB is now mandating an audit of hidden game content. The audit is retroactive to the 1st of this month. From the article: "Fully disclosing hidden content accessible as Easter eggs and via cheat codes has always been part of ESRB's explicitly stated requirements when submitting games to be rated. In the July 20 public announcement, which focused on the revocation of a specific game's rating assignment, we formally stated that any pertinent content shipped on the game disc that may be relevant to a rating must be disclosed to ESRB, even if it is not intended to ever be accessed during game play."
This is just a publicity stunt. They're doing it solely so they can look good and say that they've done something the politicians will like. There's no way they can actually enforce this.
Many games with female protagonists have nudeskins somewhere in their files, for example. There's a LOT of "hidden" content in many games, often merely because they forgot to remove it from the repository after throwing it out of the game or didn't want to break anything. What if some artist routinely put porn into the unused texture space of some assets (you laugh, that happens, just not with porn)? What if they decided to cull some features to lower the rating but didn't completely delete the stuff?
I know that a LOT of games would get rated 18 here in Germany should they do such a reevaluation here (often blood effects and stuff get disabled in the german version to avoid a ban from advertising and they can be enabled again by flipping a few bits). Obviously that's not really a problem for the US, the only country specific "taming" I heard of was Giants: Citizen Kabuto, where that Sea Reaper girl is topless in the international version. But cutting of content to get a lower rating happens in the US, too (just that it'll be removed from all versions, not just the US one). EA seems to do it a lot. Wouldn't surprise me if that was done sloppily after the months of 20 hour days leading up to a release. After all, you might have attempted to load that stuff somewhere and instead of going bug hunting you just kill the trigger.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Can games be released as "Unrated" in a similar way to movies? If so, I say down with ratings! :)
From TFA: Fully disclosing hidden content accessible as Easter eggs and via cheat codes has always been part of ESRB's explicitly stated requirements when submitting games to be rated.
I wonder what "fully" means? I mean, every cheat code possibility? Like this: If you change color register 1-32, 79, and 101-120 to the color of "flesh," characters will appear naked, but not anatomically naked. How about: if left player LP_YPOS is changed to 0 and right player RP_YPOS is changed to 132, colliding characters will have LP face aligned with RP crotch.
This is a logistical nightmare. Instead, the ESRB will have to accept blanket statements about possible cheat code types. Things like pallette changes, animation reassignment, physics changes, collision detection, hard-drive content hacking, and so on.
On the bright side, it sounds like companies will need to hire new testers. Not to mention be nice to the cheat-device manufacturers.